


Headphones and Hand Grenades

by e_cat



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: CDs, I Don't Even Know, M/M, Pre-Relationship, Ronan giving Adam things, Ronan pretending not to be insecure, for some reason, headphones, they're so close it counts, why aren't they dating yet?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-29
Updated: 2015-08-29
Packaged: 2018-04-17 21:35:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4682282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/e_cat/pseuds/e_cat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ronan has been giving Adam a lot of music-related things. Also, Adam is tired of using earbuds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Headphones and Hand Grenades

**Author's Note:**

> Do you know that saying "Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades"? That's pretty much what I manipulated to create this title, because they are just so close to a relationship. I swear, I don't even know why they aren't dating.
> 
> I also want to say thank you to [klainederful](http://archiveofourown.org/users/klainederful/pseuds/klainederful) for being generally cool and helping me a bit with figuring out what I was doing.
> 
> Characters belong to Maggie Stiefvater.

“I am so sick of earbuds,” Adam said by way of greeting as he entered Monmouth.

Gansey looked up from his book. Adam briefly wondered if it was a school book or a Glendower book before deciding that Gansey wouldn’t have looked up so easily if the text had concerned his quest. Ronan did not look up, because he was wearing a pair of headphones from which music pounded all the way across the room. Adam felt his rage at the idea of earphones bubbling up again.

Gansey gestured for Adam to continue. “Why are you sick of earbuds?”

Adam sighed and dropped onto Gansey’s bed. With Gansey at his desk, and Ronan taking up the entire couch, the bed was really the next best option. Adam only felt slightly bad for not asking before he sat – he still had to remind himself sometimes that he was welcomed here.

“Because!” Adam complained. “They’re so weird! I don’t know what to do with them anymore!”

Gansey frowned. “What do you mean?” He glanced down at his textbook, and added a sticky note to mark where he’d left off. Adam wished he had the money to spend on sticky notes.

“Well,” Adam said, “do I put them in both ears? It seems kind of pointless, don’t you think? They’re never comfortable, anyways!” Gansey nodded sympathetically, and Adam continued his rant. “But if I don’t use both of them, people think they can talk to me!”

Ronan’s snort came from across the room, and Adam looked up to see him smirking with his headphones around his neck. “Shit, Parrish,” he said, “I didn’t know you were so fucking antisocial.”

Adam scowled at him. “Shut up, Lynch,” he retorted. “You know what I mean.” He tapped his dead ear with an impatient jerk of his head. “I can’t hear them.”  
Ronan shrugged and slipped his headphones back over his ears as if he didn’t care. His eyes were capriciously focused on the floor, the wall, his leather bands. His fingers drummed in time to the music that only seemed to have gotten louder.

Adam sighed and turned back to Gansey, his irritation pushed aside by something else. Gansey was worrying at his lip, wondering at the answer to a question he had expected Ronan to ask. “What do you use headphones for, anyways? I didn’t think you had a music player.”

Sighing again, Adam drew the bulky CD player out of his bag. “One of my coworkers offered it to me. Nobody uses these anymore.” He didn’t mention that his coworker had sent more glances towards Ronan’s BMW idling at the edge of the parking lot than usual. Or that since he had gotten the player a week and a half ago, Ronan had been incessantly throwing CDs at him like Frisbees, accompanied by comments like “You’ll hate this,” or “Here’s a thing for your dinosaur player.”

“Hmm,” Gansey considered. “Earbuds, too?”

Adam shrugged. “You can buy earbuds in a vending machine.”

Gansey frowned at this piece of information, apparently startled again by the facts of lower-class life – his own earbuds were undoubtedly purchased for an obscene amount of money from some website using buzzwords like “noise-cancelling” and “volume-control.” Adam tried to find it in himself to be angry, but he knew too well that Gansey didn’t _mean_ to be so clueless. It was unbearably quiet.

Adam whirled, almost against his will, to look at Ronan. There was no longer any audible sound coming from his headphones, though they still rested on his ears. Adam narrowed his eyes suspiciously, but Ronan didn’t take his eyes – or his teeth – off of the leather bands on his wrist.

Gansey cleared his throat, and Adam turned his attention back to him, filing away any embarrassment he may have felt for later. Gansey spoke hesitantly, as though he knew his words wouldn’t be taken well, as though he felt he had to say them anyways. “You could always use, ahem, traditional headphones.”

He gestured to Ronan, and Adam’s gaze followed his hand. His eyes remained on Ronan as he replied. “I don’t have the money, Gansey. I’ll make do with what I have.”

Gansey was silent for a minute that stretched like an eternity. Ronan continued chewing his leather bands, and Adam continued watching him. Gansey said, finally, “Why did you bring it up, then?”

Adam faltered. “I… don’t know,” he said quietly. But he _did_ know. Because he’d just gotten off an eight-hour shift by himself at Boyd’s garage. Because he’d listened to every disk Ronan had given him and his ears were starting to ache. Because he was _tired._ Because he’d wanted to just _complain_ for once. Because he’d wanted to see what Ronan would say. Because he’d wanted to see if Ronan would even listen.

Gansey sighed. He knew better than to offer to buy Adam headphones, but his desire to do so was audible in that sigh. “All right,” he said. And that was that. Gansey went back to his textbook, and Adam allowed himself a minute to close his eyes before he pulled out his own homework. Ronan’s music slowly climbed back up to wailing, and Adam winced in discomfort as he put in his own ear buds just to drown out his curiosity.

An hour or so later, Blue showed up, and Noah coincided her arrival by emerging from his room, and they went to Nino’s, and they ate pizza, and Adam decidedly did _not_ look at Ronan across the table. And, for a brief second, Adam didn’t worry about anything at all.

 

 

After Nino’s, Adam returned to his undersized apartment above the church. He didn’t have work tonight, so he had hours to study instead. With all the hours he spent working, Adam had to carefully arrange any free time that wasn’t already reserved for Glendower or the ley line. This meant attempting to keep a delicate balance between studying just enough that he could stay at the top of the class, and sleeping just enough that he didn’t collapse.

It was 1:14 AM. In just over three hours, he needed to be awake to put in a couple hours at the garage before school. But Adam wasn’t trying to sleep just yet. Instead, he was trying to reach a CD that had slipped down between his cardboard nightstand and the wall without knocking off any of the other disks scattered across the surface. It wasn’t going well, as Adam had to keep darting his hand back and forth to save one disk or another from sliding to the floor rather than reaching for the one that was already there.

KNOCK.

KNOCK.

KNOCK.

Adam jumped at the thumping at his door, sending about half of the CDs on his nightstand skittering to the floor. With a sigh and a dirty look shot towards the collection of homemade CDs now decorating his scratched floor, Adam got to his feet and headed to the door. He was entirely unsurprised to see Ronan on the other side of it.

“It’s late,” Adam said, though it really wasn’t; Ronan had come by later than this, and Adam never turned him away. But he never passed up a chance to give Ronan a hard time, either. He added, “I have to be up early.”

Ronan smirked and delicately removed Adam’s arm from the doorway to duck around him into the room. Adam crossed his arms and closed the door. “Did I _say_ you could come in, Lynch?”

Ronan’s grin was wide and pointed. “I invite myself.” As he ducked under a support beam, he glanced around the mess on the floor with a raised eyebrow. “Well, shit, Parrish,” he said. “I never knew you were such a slob.”

Shooting Ronan the most venomous glare he could muster, Adam shoved past him to pick up the disks. “Shut up. It’s your fault, giving me all these stupid CDs.” He felt very watched as he slid his nightstand aside, sending even more CDs to the floor, to grab the one that had started this whole thing.

“I didn’t see you complaining when you were listening to them all day,” Ronan pointed out. The bedsprings creaked as he flopped down on top of the mattress.

Adam stood, looking disapprovingly at Ronan’s relaxed form. “I was planning on sleeping there.”

Ronan shrugged. “Doesn’t seem like it.”

Adam found it in himself to turn his gaze even more scathing. “Get off my bed, Lynch.” He punctuated his command by nudging Ronan’s calf with his knee.

Sighing heavily, Ronan rolled off the bed and onto the floor. Adam rolled his eyes and turned off the lights before climbing into the bed himself. It smelled just a little bit like Ronan for just a second.

“Hey, Parrish,” Ronan said into the darkness. “Have you ever thought about breaking into the school?”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Adam replied, rolling his eyes more out of habit than expectation that Ronan could see the action. “Go to sleep.”

“Probably for the best,” Ronan agreed, yawning. “You’d probably be too scared of the dark to have any fun anyways.”

Adam hit the nightstand with his elbow so that a few CDs fell off, landing on Ronan’s face. “Go the fuck to sleep, Lynch.”

“Ah!” Ronan complained, shooting up to a seated position. “What the hell, man?”

“Seriously, I have work in the morning,” Adam said, repressing his laughter in an attempt to avoid a fight; it would only mean he wouldn’t be able to sleep. “Go to sleep, or get out.”  
Ronan muttered incomprehensibly under his breath as he collected the disks from the floor and replaced them on top of the box. “You need a fucking CD case,” he grumbled, but then he laid back down on the floor and kept quiet. When Adam woke up, Ronan was gone and there was a tree-patterned CD wallet in his place.

 

 

It was another week before anything else with the CD player came up. Ronan had apparently run out of music that he wanted to force on Adam, and had instead taken to rearranging the order of the CDs in the case, which had led to Adam listening to the wrong disk more than once when he was too tired to check. Most of them were at least tolerable, although there was one that was literally just the Murder Squash Song thirteen times in a row. Needless to say, Ronan often put that one wherever he guessed Adam was going to draw a CD from next. He usually guessed correctly.

And then, one night, Adam opened the case to find a new disk taking up the first slot. All of the disks up until now had been pure, blank silver, marked with titles like “Parrish’s least favorite songs” or “To be played while awake” in Ronan’s belligerent handwriting. The new disk was pure red – Ferrari red – and it had absolutely no label.

Adam was curious for multiple reasons. The strangeness of the disk was one, but, besides that, Ronan had never before left a disk for him to find; he had seemed to take some sort of pleasure in throwing a CD at Adam and walking away, and it seemed strange that he wouldn’t have done the same now. Besides this, Adam felt the same curiosity he’d had for the others: what could Ronan want him to hear so much that he’d bothered to put it on a CD for him?

Obviously, Adam immediately slipped the disk into the player and tucked the earbud into his right ear. There was silence for a moment after Adam pressed play, and then, out of nowhere:

“Adam.”

It was Ronan’s voice, and even in that one word, Adam could hear something wrong. Perhaps he wouldn’t have noticed if Ronan hadn’t used his first name. Perhaps he wouldn’t have noticed if not for the long pause that allowed him to wonder at the word. But, in any case, Adam could hear it: something was off.

Finally, Ronan’s voice came through the earphones once more. He said, “Parrish. Hey.” There was still something wrong with it, but it was closer to normal than before. “Just listen for a second, okay? I mean, that’s what you’re doing anyways, right?” Adam could hear the smirk in Ronan’s voice just then, and he realized with a jolt what had been wrong before: Ronan Lynch was _nervous._

“I left something for you,” Ronan said, and Adam could hear his anxiety so clearly now that he knew what to call it. “In – in your bag,” Ronan added. “It’s – fuck it. Just go ahead and look.”

Scooping his messenger bag off the floor, Adam couldn’t help but wonder when Ronan had had the time to access it. He lifted the flap and peered into the dark mouth of the bag. The CD continued revolving in the player, the only sound the scraping of the mechanics themselves.

Adam caught a glimpse of a plastic shine – an arch – near the top of the bag, and he reached in to touch it. Wrapping his fingers easily around the shape, Adam removed the item from the bag, and it was – a pair of headphones.

Adam was stunned. They were beautiful; the shape was elegant, curves outdoing each other in a battle for functionality. The plastic frame was the exact color of Adam’s hair, with vines twisting from green at the right earphone to black at the left. The cord was the hardy brown of roots.

“Boo!”

Adam jumped; the CD had been silent so long that he had forgotten it was playing at all, but there was Ronan again, apparently having collected his composure in the silence.

“I scared you, didn’t I?” he gloated. “I’m sure even you can figure out that green means good, right, Parrish? Unless you’re colorblind, in which case… sucks for you! Anyways, I’m enabling your weird addiction to that music player from the stone ages, so I’m sure you’re grateful.” Adam snorted; it was just like Ronan to be so smugly certain of Adam’s appreciation. Not that he wouldn’t be right.

“Anyways,” Ronan continued, “you probably won’t have to worry about them being stolen by anyone uncool, because the left ear plays the Murder Squash on permanent loop. You’re fucking welcome, Parrish.”

And, with that, the CD stopped spinning.

Adam delicately removed the earbud from his right ear and brought the left ear of the headphones up to it out of curiosity. But he didn’t hear anything.

Still curious, he slipped the headphones on backwards, left earphone over right ear. The moment he had them settled in place, they began screeching, “Squash one, squash two –”

Adam tore the headphones off. Delicately, he lifted them towards his ear again, but the song had halted. It seemed that it only played the song when someone was listening, which was good, because Adam didn’t want to be picking out the lyrics to that song somewhere in his apartment as he fell sleep.

Not entirely trusting Ronan, Adam put the headphones on once more, the correct way this time: right over right. But there was no sound. No cruel prank of the murder squash song being played endlessly. He couldn’t even hear the song playing in the opposite ear.

Smiling to himself, Adam unplugged the earbud cord from the CD player and replaced it with the root-like cord to the headphones. And then he replayed Ronan’s red CD until he fell asleep.

 

 

Adam awoke unexpectedly only an hour after falling asleep. Not entirely sure what had woken him, he simply stared at the ceiling for a minute. Maybe there had been a knock at the door? It was early enough that Ronan might have come by, right?

No. Adam dismissed that, because Ronan would have been pounding on the door and shouting for him to get his ass out of bed by now.

Probably.

But Adam flashed for a second to the sound of Ronan’s voice on the CD, so familiar and yet so odd, and before he knew it, he was sprinting for the door.

“Ronan!” Adam shouted into the darkness at Ronan’s retreating form, already almost to his car. It wasn’t like Ronan to give up so easily. Maybe Adam had slept through most of his knocking. Adam didn’t think he’d slept through it.

Ronan turned slowly. It was too dark to make out his expression, but there was something about his posture that made Adam think that he almost didn’t want to come back. But, still, Ronan began his return, walking so slowly that Adam had to yell to him, “Lynch! The bugs are getting in! Hurry the fuck up!”

With Ronan under a streetlight, Adam could make out the smirk on Ronan’s face as he began dragging his feet even more. Adam crossed his arms and hoped that Ronan could see his face as well – he was displaying his best unimpressed expression.

As he reached the steps, Ronan broke into a sprint and ducked around Adam to enter the apartment. Grinning as widely as he possibly could, Ronan said, “You’re letting the bugs in, Parrish.”

Rolling his eyes, Adam closed and locked the door behind him. He said, “I take it you’re staying the night?”

Ronan shrugged. He glanced around the room and his eyes paused on the headphones resting on Adam’s bed. He said, “Did I wake you?”

Adam offered his own shrug. “I need to study more anyways.”

“Do you?” Ronan turned to him, eyebrow arched like a challenge. “You still trying to beat me out in Latin, Parrish? It’s fucking pointless; I’ll always be better than you.”

Adam shook his head and sat on his bed with his math textbook. He would have preferred to study Latin – there were a few verbs he wasn’t quite sure he knew – but he wasn’t going to give Ronan the satisfaction.

Ronan sat down on the floor, eyes focused on the edge of Adam’s mattress as he picked absently at his leather bands. It felt to Adam like there was a huge weight to the air, pressing down on his shoulders. When he couldn’t take it anymore, he set the book down on his lap. “So, uh,” he started, “I got your…” He gestured limply towards the headphones resting beside him.

Ronan looked up for a second and nodded. “I’m not fucking blind.”

“Right,” Adam agreed. “Right. I just… wanted to say thank you, I guess.”

“Real heartfelt,” Ronan muttered. “You’re welcome, I guess.” His face was so carefully blank, but Adam could see that there was a flicker of disappointment and doubt behind his eyes. Ronan was three layers of indifference stretched over seven layers of insecurity.

Adam closed his textbook and tapped it against Ronan’s head. “Whatever, Lynch. Like you’re really one for ‘heartfelt.’” He set the book on the floor where it wouldn’t be in Ronan’s way as he slept. “You want to get the lights?”

Ronan shrugged, but he got up to flip the light switch off. Adam took the opportunity to flip open the CD binder and switch out the red CD for one labeled “Excellent on repeat.” Then he slid the case back onto the bedside table and tried to suppress the mischievous smirk as Ronan returned to his spot on the floor to lie down.

Both were quiet for a minute, but then Adam whispered, “Seriously, Lynch. I mean it. Thank you.”

“Sure.” Something in his voice was guarded, though, like he was trying to keep himself from saying something. There was silence for another minute, and then: “Adam…”

Adam sighed softly. “Yeah,” he agreed, though neither of them had said anything worth agreeing with aloud. Adam could see Ronan’s fist clenching gently – not out of anger, but out of some need to keep himself contained. His eyes were squeezed shut.

As quietly as he could, Adam pressed play on the CD player and slipped the headphones over Ronan’s ears. He forgot to move his hand once he had them settled into place. The Murder Squash Song leaked out of both headphones, offensive and out of sync.

Ronan’s eyes shot open, finding Adam’s so quickly that he must have had a homing device installed while Adam wasn’t looking. His left hand came up to rest on top of Adam’s right, and he slowly lifted the headphones off as he sat up.

Adam, feeling almost trapped under Ronan’s heavy gaze, whispered, “Did I ruin the Murder Squash Song for you yet?”

Ronan shook his head slowly. Adam’s hand was still being held captive by his. They weren’t quite touching otherwise, but they were close enough that it seemed to count in its own way.

“No,” Ronan whispered back. “I think you just made it better.”


End file.
